SAMWU workers accused of sabotage of the BCM

BY ASAVELA FEKEMA - APRIL 28, 2016

Over a thousand South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) workers gathered outside the Buffalo City Municipality offices in East London on Thursday in violation of the court interdict awarded to the municipality against them.

For the past few weeks, the Buffalo City Metro has been having a water crisis, which it says was caused by “sabotage” by SAMWU, which is demanding that the metro pays the salaries of its 5 603 workers, including the mayor, and 3 852 SAMWU members.

Buffalo City Mayoral spokesperson, Sibusiso Cindi, was quoted in the Daily Dispatch last week as having said that the idea of the strike was far-fetched and senior members are encouraging it.

“Striking Samwu members on Thursday forced their way into our finance department and used pliers to cut cables connected to our IT systems that enable salaries to be paid,” he said.

The result was a total collapse of the municipality’s payroll system and some of the workers could not get paid on the pay day.

It is alleged that some of the striking workers sprayed the cables with water and dumped garbage in front of the offices.

Cindi then said that the Buffalo City Municipality’s management was working round the clock to ensure that staff get their salaries before the end of day last Saturday.

For the past two weeks, there have been reports of pipes bursting and not being repaired in time and garbage not being picked up in the BCM area.

At the time of publishing, RNews had not received comment from SAMWU in East London, which asked us to call later.

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